The purpose of the proposed research is to investigate three aspects of remarriage in the United States. First, what factors determine entry into remarriage; especially, how does previous fertility influence the likelihood of remarriage and the time required to become remarried? Second, what factors influence remarriage fertility; in particular, how does fertility from a previous union (or experienced outside marriage) affect the number and spacing of births in remarriages? Third, what factors influence marital dissolution in remarriages; especially, how do fertility of the remarriage and of previous unions affect the likelihood of dissolution and the duration that remarriages remain intact; and how do remarriage childbearing and marital instability influence each other? The proposed research will employ two large existing, publicly available data files (the 1973 National Study of Family Growth (NSFG), and the June 1975 Current Population Survey (CPS)). The study will use several analytical techniques to address fundamental substantive questions about childbearing, remarriage, and the dissolution of remarriages; the techniques are chosen to overcome certain methodological problems (notably the truncation of reproductive and marital histories in cross-sectional survey data) that have led to incomplete or inaccurate inferences in past research. The main techniques we propose to use are life table methods (multiple decrement and increment-decrement tables) and multivariate analysis of life table probabilities as dependent variables in multiple regression analyses and thus allow the study of determinants of differences in reproductive and marital experience). The reciprocal influence of fertility and the dissolution of second marriage will be examined through the use of simultaneous logit models.